Comment by smanek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smanek | Hacker News Reader

No one has ever seriously suggested using Hydrogen as an energy source - that's impossible. What we are suggesting is using hydrogen as a battery, until we get things like super-capacitors working. And, we can fill the battery with nuclear energy.

Nuclear didn't fail for technological reasons. It failed for political ones. Nuclear Breeder reactors are still, by a huge margin, the cheapest, safest, and most sustainable energy solution that the world knows. Using them to power the energy grid directly, and then to charge whatever portable battery we're using (hydrogen, etc) is sustainable for at least another thousand years.

Of course, there are huge technological hurdles to using hydrogen as a portable energy storage device. But, I think we're closer to production on hydrogen energy than we are with any alternative. Super-capacitors of sufficient energy density and low enough cost are (imho) at least 20 years off. Man made gasoline (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/science/19carb.html) shows promise, but no one has ever done it - so we're a decade away from that at best.

The author of the article proposes biofuels, but they are arguably even more inefficient than hydrogen. Not to mention that we have millions of starving people on this planet already. When it takes ~26 lbs of corn to make one gallon of ethanol (that's about an acres worth for every 250 gallons) I really think we should be looking at alternatives.

We agree totally on nuclear power.

I think that the concerns about feeding the starving people in impoverished countries should be better-directed at their governments. In many cases, food supplied as aid by the U.S. and U.N. is either rejected outright due to political bias, sold on the open market to produce money for corrupt officials, or left to rot in warehouses due to the local government not doing anything to put infrastructure in place to move 'the food' to 'the starving people'.

I'm not an advocate for biofuels, but making the argument that biofuel production is a direct cause of world starvation is more than a little far-fetched; the causes are complex, and more political than technological in origin, much like the failings of the nuclear power industry in the States.

Also don't ignore that, in the U.S., a great deal of arable land goes to waste because of government farm subsidies and other political buggery.

For the sake of playing with some numbers, let's assume that a reasonably efficient car, powered by ethanol, would require ten gallons of fuel per week, or around five hundred gallons per year. That's two acres per car, per year. There are approximately sixty million registered cars in the U.S., requiring a hundred and twenty million acres of farmland be dedicated to producing fuel for these cars, and this is only if the cars ran solely on ethanol.

So, if every car in the US were to run on Ethanol, it would consume one-fifth of the total agricultural production capacity.

Also note that some quick Googling for me shows that yields might be almost double the 250 gallons/acre number for biofuels.

This doesn't mean that biofuels are the ideal solution, but they are certainly a strong contender.

Actually, I may have just become a biofuel advocate. The technology to build flex-fuel cars exists now, and can take advantage of the existing transportation infrastructure until such time as a better means, be it hydrogen, super-capacitors, or dilithium crystals, is available. Doing so would reduce dependence on foreign oil, help boost the national economy, and would likely have the positive side effect of promoting research into increasing long-term, sustainable, high crop yields.

The current food crisis cannot be blamed on third world governments, as was the case in most earlier famines. This crisis in caused by a sudden spike in the price of rice, grain and other staples. See also this article: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...

Moving from growing food to growing biofuels is necessarily going to influence the price of food - basically the prices of oil and of food staples are going to move in tandem. And we should be very careful before we commit one fifth of arable land to biofuels.

Ultimately this food crisis is caused by poverty, and there's no easy cure for that.

Not debasing the currency is a start.

That is simply not true! See Zimbabwe. Not long ago they were a huge exporter of food, the "breadbasket of Africa" everyone called them. Now look at them. Mugabe has brought them to ruin.

Sure, Zimbabwe is a total disaster, but the current food crisis is world-wide: in Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Haiti, the Philippines, Egypt. etc. The price of rice has almost tripled in less than two years.

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cf...

The vast majority of corn grown in the US is for cattle feed. And if we're talking about energy efficiency, that's pretty much as bad as it can get. Not to mention that if we worry about feeding the planet, we should immediately stop growing cattle, except possibly where they can graze on land too marginal for agriculture. Growing a heavily fossil-fuel based crop like corn to feed cattle only makes sense because a) most of the costs of the fossil fuel are externalized, and b) no one actually cares about how many people we can feed, because the people that can pay want beef.

Nuclear Breeder reactors are still, by a huge margin, the cheapest, safest, and most sustainable energy solution that the world knows.

I've often heard this, but is it really the safest? I haven't heard of anything like Inside Chernobyl, a strange new lifeform is blooming (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=257454) for any other power source (oil spills aren't in the same league).

At Chernobyl they messed up big time... The incident actually occured while performing an ill-planned test with some safety measures disabled.

All safety measures had been disabled.

Let's also remember a couple of other facts:

Chernobyl was in an office building, with no additional containment built around the reactor core.

Chernobyl was an outdated, graphite-modulated reactor. Several years prior to the disaster, German nuclear engineers had found that this reactor design would go uncontrollably critical if certain conditions were met. The Chernobyl engineers didn't know about this, thanks to the Soviet government.

I suspect any engineer in a position of sufficient power did know about this, but no orders were given to upgrade the process appropriately, or, gasp!, take the reactor offline; doing so would be equated to admitting defeat of the Soviet nuclear physics program, a result that was very clearly unacceptable.

And let's not forget that a large fraction of casualties after the Chernobyl accident is attributable to the fact that the general public was not informed for an entire day after the accident, in fact not until a powerplant in Sweden reported heightened radioactivity levels. This, with Kiev, Ukraine's multi-million capital, only 100km from Chernobyl.

I appreciate the information everyone - thanks.

The thing about nuclear power is that errors such as these have more serious consequences than for other sources of power. Or so it would appear.

But all this is relative: if nuclear power is the safest source of power, is there another source of power that is more dangerous than it?

Here's a nice list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Comparison_w...

Several of those disasters, of scales arguably larger than Chernobyl, were caused by attempts to generate power. And although I do not have any evidence to back this, I suspect the total number of casualties resulting from burning fossil fuels over the past century far exceeds that from nuclear power related accidents.

The one aspect of nuclear accidents I'd be willing to concede is the long-term contamination of the area, but while rendering chunks of land unusable, it is not a direct threat to life.

Thanks, informative. Hydroelectric power sounds very clean and safe, but dam failure is catastrophic.

I'm sure you're correct on the fatalities for fossil fuel vs. nuclear, but fossil fuels are also much more widely used (I imagine by several orders of magnitude).

Making land unsafe is a less dramatic aspect of safety, but actually destroying usable land is an amazing feat of destruction. I guess if reactors were located on land that was already unusable (eg. desert, esp Antarctica) it wouldn't matter so much. But I think (present-day) electrical transmission requires them to be close to the power consumers?

> but fossil fuels are also much more widely used (I imagine by several orders of magnitude)

True. Also consider the relative efficiency of the generation methods. Supplying the world's demand for energy with nuclear power would probably require far fewer powerplants than doing so by other means.

> I guess if reactors were located on land that was already unusable (eg. desert, esp Antarctica)

Except for the melting of the Antarctic ice and all that, in case of an accident :) Most technology seems to involve a trade-off of evils.

OK, you may have me there :). All power sources are dangerous, but we need fewer of a more efficient one.

New dangers with nuclear power may be discovered (like those that those German researchers did), but that seems to be true also of new technology in dams and oil transport etc.

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